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40 years later, Tim Fuller's fall is recalled as Boulder County evolves

Boulder city councilman was recalled for supporting anti-discrimination measure

By Charlie Brennan

Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
07/25/2014 03:19:17 PM MDT

Updated:
07/26/2014 02:56:37 PM MDT

Former Boulder City Council member Tim Fuller, right, and his partner of 49 years, Howard Deakyne, along with their dog Lily at their home outside Dripping Springs, Texas. They were married last year. (Mark Matson / For the Camera)

It could be said that it has only taken 40 years for the times to catch up to Tim Fuller.

Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall continues to carve her place in future Colorado history books by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of threats and attempted court intervention on the part of state Attorney General John Suthers. But Fuller etched his entry there a long time ago.

Now 71, Fuller is watching the current Boulder sexual equity drama unfold from the six-acre spread outside Dripping Springs, Texas, that he shares with his partner of 49 years, Howard Deakyne. The two men married in Vancouver, Washington, on Oct. 3.

"We do have computers here, and the Internet," Fuller noted, with a soft chuckle.

It was the early days of computers — anything resembling the Internet was still unheard of to virtually everyone — when Fuller dominated headlines in Boulder and beyond in the early 1970s during his brief and turbulent career on the Boulder City Council.

Most famously, Fuller stands still as the city's only sitting council member to be recalled in the past century, for his vote as part of a five-member majority in support of an ordinance barring employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Research by Wendy Hall, manager of Boulder's Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, found record of no other council member's recall, dating back to 1918.

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Targeted in the same September 1974 recall was then-Mayor Penfield Tate, the first and still the sole African American ever to hold that office in Boulder. Tate — who introduced the so-called "sexual preference" amendment in December 1973 — dodged recall by fewer than 600 votes. Fuller, however, went down in the recall, falling just short of the 50 percent of the electorate he needed to hang on.

Tim Fuller (Camera file photo)

"I don't shy from it, and many times I use it as a badge of honor, in the sense that I stood my ground for something of strong principle," Fuller said of being recalled. "I was just ahead of the population at the time.

"The biggest learning experience in my life was serving on the City Council and realizing the limitations of how far you can push democracy and populist approval. I realize that I had exceeded that."

The three women on the council who had also voted for the anti-discrimination ordinance, Karen Paget, Janet Roberts and Ruth Correll, could not be targeted for recall under the city's charter because at that time they had been re-elected less than six months before.

Tate, who would lose a re-election bid in 1975, Correll, who became Boulder's first female mayor in 1978, and Roberts have all died. That leaves Fuller and Paget — who is Hillary Hall's mother-in-law — as the lone surviving members of a council majority that was the center of the storm four decades ago this year.

"She is really doing well, by her stance. I think her standing up to the restrictions and to the old way of thinking has been what I consider standard Boulder politics, and I really appreciate that and congratulate that."

For Hall, the feelings of respect are mutual. Although she was primarily raised in Boulder, her family was living in Walnut Creek, California — and she was just 8 years old — at the time that Fuller and Tate found themselves at the melting point of a political inferno.

But Hall has become schooled in that history, in no small part through conversations with her mother-in-law, Paget, who was part of it.

"We're where we are now because of so many people," Hall said. "Back then, that's when it took courage. That's when it took commitment, when you had their commitment to justice and equality and fairness. ... It is so admirable."

Former Boulder City Council member Tim Fuller, left, and his partner of 49 years, Howard Deakyne, live near Dripping Springs, Texas. (Mark Matson / For the Camera)

Paget, living now in Emeryville, California, is not in frequent contact with Fuller. But her thoughts have turned to him, as Hall fights for same-sex marriage on the same turf where a young, long-haired man's opposition to sexual discrimination in employment got him thrown out of office.

"I think he understood that he was way out in front, and I think he understood on some level that would change over time," Paget said. "But that's what happens to you when you're that far in front.

"A lot of people didn't even know he was gay at that time. I don't think he considered himself in the closet. It just didn't arise."

Fuller said his homosexuality was known to those in his inner circle, and a decision was made that, despite his support of the non-discrimination law, he wasn't going to promote his sexual preferences in the political arena.

"Basically, the idea was if I were ever asked, or if it were ever made an issue, I would stand up to it," Fuller said. "I was never asked, and therefore, I never told."

'Huge conservative backlash'

Fuller recalls that the Boulder he arrived in for the first time from his native east Texas in 1966 — then returning to settle down in 1968 — ended on the north side at about Iris Avenue and Broadway.

He and Deakyne had about $20 between them.

"That was when Boulder was a staid and sleepy little college town," he said, and Fuller understood that he was part of a coming wave of "new people and new ideas" that stood to change the city's character.

He had come out to his parents, who ran a dairy farm in Huntsville, Texas; actually, he admits he was caught by his father in the act of "fooling around" with a friend from his high school football team. But his evolution as a political activist and social progressive was moderated by the practicalities of an early life marked by 4 a.m. wake-ups to help milk cows.

"I hadn't read a book until I got to the University of Texas," he claimed. "That was like going to New York. I hadn't been out of the county, except to go buy cows or go rodeoing."

Perhaps fittingly, Fuller's first job in the Boulder area, after leaving the study of philosophy behind in Austin, was as a horse wrangler on the Trojan Ranch in Gold Hill, the first place he ever saw snow.

"It was a wonderful time, extraordinary time. But it was not liveable," he said in an oral history recorded by the Carnegie Branch Library. "We had this one little stove. And I'd never heard of anything like 40 degrees below zero, with the wind."

After seeing a bit too much snow that first winter, he and Deakyne fled for a year or so to San Francisco, landing in the Haight-Ashbury district, the epicenter of a cultural revolution that helped shape their political and social consciences. They were back in Boulder by 1968, and Fuller bought the Brillig Works bookstore at 1332 College Ave., which became a landmark social hub on University Hill.

With the Brillig Works as a springboard, Fuller also helped found and served as president of the Community Free School, originally anchored at the Highland School at Ninth Street and Arapahoe Avenue. It had as many as 5,000 students enrolled a year in its heyday, he said.

When Fuller won election to the City Council in 1971 at age 28, his campaign was fueled by issues such as tenants' rights, giving voice to student and minority concerns, and limited growth.

"I didn't run as a gay person for the City Council, for practical purposes," he said. "Boulder may have been very open, but at the same time, there was this huge conservative backlash. The changing personality and the changing characteristics of Boulder was on the table, and it would have been a step too far back in '70 and '71."

Glenda Russell, a psychologist and former University of Colorado professor, arrived in Boulder in 1970 and has written extensively on LGBT psychology. Fuller most recently came to Boulder in 2009 to deliver a keynote address at a symposium Russell helped organize, "Boulder's Queer History: Out of the Shadows."

Russell said Fuller's support of Boulder's sexual preference ordinance — the law would be easily overturned by a voter referendum the same year as his recall — was just one piece of a complex political dynamic that led to his ouster.

"Tim, together with Pen Tate, they were absolutely significant figures, and they were both ahead of their time," Russell said. "Tim was ahead of his time as a gay man who was trying to do the right thing, despite the fact that he wasn't very open about his sexual orientation at the time.

"He was taking more heat for being a representative of the hippie contingent. He was for landlord-tenant rights, and that inspired as much antagonism for Tim as anything else. The town was truly split, and Tim was seen to represent a number of interests that weren't popular at the time."

The Daily Camera reported aggressively on an allegation that Fuller hadn't met the requirement of a minimum three years' residence at the time he ran for the council, also running numerous ads placed by those arguing the same point.

The allegation made its way into Boulder District Court, with the support of first-term District Attorney Alex Hunter. It became moot, however, after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled a similar statute from Aspen to be unconstitutional.

Former Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Clela Rorex, the subject of national news coverage in 1975 for issuing marriage licenses to a half-dozen same-sex couples before stopping under order of Colorado's attorney general, said Fuller and the other council members who had supported the anti-discrimination ordinance were important influences to her.

"They certainly contributed to my education, in terms of being leaders and standing up for civil rights, and they were very much a part of helping develop my own thought process along those lines," said Rorex, who turned 71 on Wednesday and now lives in Longmont.

She also sees Fuller's recall and the attempt to oust Tate as a reminder of a tension between liberal and conservative values in Boulder County that she believes has never vanished completely — even though its congressional district is now represented by the openly gay U.S. Rep. Jared Polis.

The city's voters also approved a citizens initiative to include sexual orientation as part of the city's Human Rights Ordinance in 1987.

However, "Boulder always liked to give the semblance of being extremely liberal, but I'm not even sure that today they can say that wholeheartedly," Rorex said.

"It's a college town, of course, and there are many liberal-minded and progressive-minded people that live in college towns, but there are components of conservatism in Boulder. I still really believe it."

'I got ahead of the game'

Fuller moved from Boulder for good not long after the 1974 recall. He has never again put himself on the line as a candidate.

"When I left the City Council, I decided I never wanted to run for public office again, for personal reasons, not just for political reasons," he said.

Fuller and his partner's first stop was a 200-acre goat farm in south-central Missouri. Politics remained in his blood, however, evidenced by his serving in the mid-1980s as executive director of the Missouri Democratic Party, and by subsequent years of activism in Washington, D.C., including as executive director of the Gray Panthers and taking leadership roles in national efforts to combat hunger and homelessness.

Additionally, Fuller has strategized other candidates' bids for both statewide and national office.

"Being a candidate took a huge amount in personal integrity challenges, and I didn't want to go through that again," Fuller said. "Like, for instance, had I run as an openly gay man? I didn't feel like I could do that and get away with being an elected official anywhere. I prefer managing and putting strategies together, a game-plan."

Fuller admits that as the discussion among gay activists started to build in the 1990s toward fighting for gay marriage rights, he was unconvinced of the wisdom of such a focus. He didn't view marriage as being supportive of the progressive values he had long embraced.

Historically, he said, "It goes to possession and roles and a dynamic that basically represses the women of the relationship. And no matter where you look, going back years and years and years, even in the Bible, (it seemed) that marriage would not be a good model for defining open and challenging intellectual relationships.

"Why take that on as something that puts up another barrier?" he said. "I was concerned in the mid-90s that gay marriage would set the wrong dynamic, as to how the movement could influence positively our world. I think that was short-sighted on my part."

Fuller traces his own shift in attitude to the pairing on the national stage of attorneys David Boies and Theodore Olson, ideological foes in the Bush versus Gore election battle of 2000, in successfully challenging California's Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Once Ted Olson became involved, I changed my whole mind because of his reputation," Fuller said. "Boies and Olson combined what needed to be done, in both the liberal and conservative viewpoint. They did it as it should have been done."

Like many advocates of same-sex marriage, Fuller believes the tide is moving irrevocably in one direction and will not recede.

"My point of view is that the door has been opened. There is no way back now," Fuller said.

He spends a lot of time writing, landscaping and pitching in on chores to help his neighbors. And Fuller maintains pride over his central role in an aspect of Boulder County history to which new chapters are being scripted almost daily.

"Was I happy living there? Was I proud of my time there? Yes," Fuller said. "Was I disappointed that I got ahead of the game? Yes. That was my mistake, and I did not know it until after the fact.

"I thought I was pushing the edge, in tandem to the population. And I just got ahead of it."

The late Mayor Penfield Tate, left, and Tim Fuller were both targeted for recall from the Boulder City Council in 1974. Tate narrowly survived the vote, but Fuller failed to secure enough votes to hold onto his post. (Camera file photo)

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